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Clean energy and clean water are among the major challenges for sustainable development especially in emerging countries. But traditional approaches to electricity generation consume huge amounts of water. In the US and Europe about 50% of water withdrawals are for energy production.
Similarly, producing water for humans via desalination in countries with water scarcity is a huge consumer of energy. It's estimated that in Arab countries around 15% of electricity production is used to produce drinking water.
Now, researchers believe they have found a way to combine these actions in a single device.
Existing state-of-the-art solar panels face physical limits on the amount of sunlight they can actually turn into electricity. Normally about 10-20% of the sun that hits the panel becomes power. The rest of this heat is considered as waste.
In this experiment, the scientists designed a three stage membrane distillation unit and attached it to the back of the photovoltaic (PV) panel.
The membrane essentially evaporates seawater at relatively low temperatures. The researchers were able to produce three times more water than conventional solar stills while also generating electricity with an efficiency greater than 11%. This meant the device was generating nine times more power than had been achieved in previously published research.
"The waste heat from PV panels has really been ignored, no one has thought about it as a resource," said lead author Prof Peng Wang from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
"We use the heat to generate water vapour that gets transported across the membrane and then it condenses on the other side."
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48910569
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 12 2019, @07:26PM (4 children)
Make it really large and just collect the desalinated water that falls from the sky for free, after all, it is solar powered, and a simple container should be easier and cheaper to build than all those fancy panels, pumps, and filters. When you're mobile you can follow the storm.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 12 2019, @07:42PM (2 children)
Even if the idea wasn't stupid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Saudi_Arabia [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_United_States#Overall_average(s) [wikipedia.org]
Saudia Arabia average annual precipitation = 11.1 cm (4.4 inches).
Contiguous United States = 74.2 cm (29.23 inches).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 12 2019, @08:09PM (1 child)
Hey, if they can pipe oil across Alaska, they can pipe water from a huge barge in the middle of the ocean, where it is raining. Gotta be very careful with spillage though...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:51AM
Actually, the plan is to pipe water from Canada too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_export [wikipedia.org]
No need for fancy tech at all.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 12 2019, @09:50PM
In some places, it's not such a stupid idea.
Solar PV is used in places that do get rain. It might not be a bad thing if those panels could simply collect the rain water.
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